The Humbling: Philip Roth’s Bleak Theater

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In his 1968 study Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the sociologist Erving Goffman famously adopted a “dramaturgical perspective” as his method of description, restricting himself to a theatrical vocabulary when interpreting social relations. Accounting for the behavior of a waitress, he might take care to refer to the “costume” she wore, the “performance” she delivered before her “audience,” the “props” she manipulated, and so on, with the result that dramaturgical scare quotes come to enclose every action in an ozone of artifice. The book, at times, can be a bleak read: it begins to look as if spontaneous, authentic, unperformed relations between people are impossible.

An identical bleakness is at work in Philip Roth’s new novel, The Humbling, which reads in places like the diary of a madman who believes he’s trapped inside Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Roth’s thirtieth, The Humbling charts the mental dissolution of the senescent ex-actor Simon Axler, whose end-of-career unemployment and irremediable actor’s block have driven him, at the book’s open, to thoughts of suicide. His problem is one of crippling Goffmanian self-consciousness: he suffers from the delusion that he’s acting at all times, performing in the play of his own life. “The only role available to him was the role of someone playing a role,” Roth writes. “[E]very word he uttered seemed acted instead of spoken.”

Onstage, Axler had once been able to transcend acting and truly “inhabit” a role, to “make the imagined real” and be Macbeth; now, after a double-bill butchering of both Macbeth and Prospero at the Kennedy Center, he’s so racked by doubt and self-alienation that he has trouble just being Axler. A stagy unreality has leached into his everyday experience of selfhood. Even his nervous breakdown seems like a performance—“an act, a bad act”—as if he were merely “playing the role of [his] own demise”:

He could not convince himself he was mad any more than he’d been able to convince himself or anyone else he was Prospero or Macbeth. He was an artificial madman too…A sane man playing an insane man…In the mornings he hid in bed for hours, but instead of hiding from the role he was merely playing the role…[A]ll he could think about was suicide… A man who wanted to live playing a man who wanted to die.

The attraction of suicide, for Axler, is that it constitutes a last opportunity to “make the imagined real,” an escape hatch out of everyday theatricality into an authentically inhabited experience. “Suicide is the role that you write for yourself,” he explains. “You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged—where they will find you and how they will find you…But one performance only.” This is why so many characters in plays commit suicide, he thinks: self-annihilation is central to the experience of performativity, and vice versa, “as though [suicide] were a formula fundamental to drama,…dictated by the workings of the genre itself.” That is, dramatic characters resort to suicide as an exit strategy for the same reason Axler would—they are trapped in plays.

If Axler sounds like a Bernhard character here, expatiating feverishly on the nature of suicide, it’s because The Humbling is, at bottom, a madman novel. Axler is a pathologically alienated monomaniac, whose obsessive fear is that he’s locked inside a drama, and the job of the madman novel is to convince him he’s right—to poke and prod him, push him to the limit, to corroborate his delusion and thereby usher him to its logical conclusion. In this, Roth doesn’t disappoint: dutifully he subjects his madman to a series of increasingly play-like situations, each tragically calibrated to make Axler lose his mind. When Axler enters a psychiatric ward, for example, the group-therapy sessions there are structured exactly like dress rehearsals: the patients with their round-robin monologues remind him of character actors, “rehearsing…the ancient themes of dramatic literature: incest, betrayal, injustice, cruelty, vengeance, jealously, rivalry, desire, loss, dishonor, grief;” chiming in himself, Axler soon realizes he’s “perform[ing] before his largest audience since he’d given up acting.” All the world’s a stage! (Wincingly, a doctor even refers to his grief as a “stage” of misery.) Eventually Axler leaves the hospital, but fares no batter back home. In his yard he spots a possum, the one animal guaranteed to remind him of “playing dead”: for days Axler watches as the marsupial, “nature’s little caricature of him,” prepares a hovel in the snow to die in.

Occasionally the narrator will play along, confirming at the level of word choice the reality of Axler’s “dramaturgical perspective.” Indeed, part of the pleasure of the novel is the Goffmanian ruthlessness with which Roth hews to a theatrical vocabulary. When Axler stakes his happiness on a last-ditch sexual fling, for instance, the narrator describes the fling as follows: “He was here. She was here. Everyone’s possibilities had changed dramatically.” Is it even possible to read that sentence as, “Everyone’s possibilities had changed a lot”? Maybe in a different novel. But Axler’s obsession italicizes “dramatically,” even if Roth’s typeset doesn’t.

Naturally, the lover Axler chooses is tragically ill-considered. What he needs is a relationship that won’t feel scripted or staged; what he gets is a woman precision-engineered to convince him that he’s performing at the deepest levels of himself. A middle-aged lesbian, moreover a butch who “owned little that couldn’t be worn by a sixteen-year-old boy,” Pegeen dresses and even walks like a man when Axler first seduces her. They tacitly agree that she must “become a heterosexual female,” and her conversion is treated (along with everything else) as a matter of performance: Axler takes her on a series of transformative shopping sprees, buying her Prada pumps, smart skirts, and expensive jewelry. Nor is her performance of femininity, or his role as costume director, lost on him. “Wasn’t he making her pretend to be someone other…?” he wonders. “Wasn’t he dressing her up in a costume?”

There’s a lability of sexuality and gender in this novel, everywhere depicted in terms of performativity. Pegeen “becomes” a heterosexual female as easily as her former lover, undergoing hormone treatment and surgical breast removal, “became” a heterosexual male. Pegeen “becomes” a male herself whenever she dons her green strap-on dildo, which Axler thinks of, characteristically, as “a mask on her genitals.” Axler, too, performs his sexuality, and not at all subtly—when he and Pegeen bring home a drunk woman for a three-way, he joins the fray thusly: “‘Three children got together,’ he said, ‘and decided to put on a play,’ whereupon his performance began.”

None of this, obviously, helps Axler shake the feeling that he’s playing a role—least of all when he and Pegeen “role-play” in bed. Dating her, he doesn’t escape from the role, only manages to “dig himself deeper into an unreal world.” And that’s before you even factor in Pegeen’s dramaturgical lineage. The daughter of some old theater friends of Axler’s, Pegeen Mike is named after a character in Playboy of the Western World, a play that Axler got his start in: while Pegeen’s mother, just pregnant with Pegeen, played Pegeen, Axler played the title role, opposite Pegeen1 (the character) and Pegeen2 (the fertilized egg and, unbeknownst to him, his future lover). This leads to a metafictionally vertiginous sequence in which Axler, arguing with Pegeen2, begins addressing her as if she were the character in the play: “‘Perhaps, Pegeen Mike,’ he said, falling into the Irish accent he hadn’t used since acting in Playboy…” Of course, it’s fatalistically engineered—and somewhat overdetermined—that he and Pegeen should begin dating forty years after that performance: he really is “playing a role” by dating her, a character from a play, and it’s one of the oldest roles he knows. He even lapses into lines from the script!

This is the point that critics are missing when they complain that Pegeen is too sketchily drawn; that, if you try to read her as a realistically motivated character, it’s not always clear why she (a middle-aged lesbian) is even with Axler (an old man) in the first place. But Pegeen’s plainly not a realistically motivated character, any more than the possum was, and she should be read as fulfilling the same function as the possum: she’s visiting Axler—Roth is inflicting her on him—as a destroying angel of thematic appositeness. She’s not his most credible sexual partner, just as Jocasta wasn’t Oedipus’s: she’s the shortest route to the ripping out of Axler’s eyeballs. And as a narrative device designed to ratify Axler’s nightmare and precipitate his suicide, she reads splendidly.

When she leaves him, as she must, he calls her parents to discover where she’s gone, but feels more than ever as if he’s merely reading off a script. What follows is a fever dream of self-consciousness, and the entire sinuous movement of the novel can be glimpsed, in miniature, in the peristalsis of Axler’s thought patterns here—from the alienated experience of his “self” as a role, to his resolution to commit suicide:

His voice was trembling and his heartbeat had quickened…It was very like the way he’d felt [at the Kennedy Center]…If he were given this role to act in a play, how would he do it?…He could no more figure out how to play the [abandoned] elderly lover…than he’d been able to figure out how to play Macbeth. Shouldn’t he just have blown his brains out while [Pegeen’s mother] was at the other end listening? Wouldn’t that have been the best way to play it?

The reader perks up at the line, “No more than he’d been able to play Macbeth.” A hundred and fifty pages earlier, this was just how he described the hollow fraudulence of his breakdown: he’s left at the same impasse, with the same recourse. Not long after hanging up the phone, Axler does commit suicide, and it’s the only suicide available to him: that of a character in a play. Pretending that “the attic [is] a theater” and that he’s the character Konstantin Gavrilovich from Chekhov’s The Seagull, he takes down his hunting rifle and sets the stage for a final performance. No encores. His suicide note contains only the play’s parting line of dialogue: “The fact is, Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself.”

It is a black, ambivalent ending. How to read Axler’s “transformation” into Konstantin Gavrilovich? Either the bullet that breached his skull breached the dramaturgical scare quotes, too, freeing Axler, one last time, from the imagined into the real; or else he’s entered more radically than ever before into the artificiality of a play, embedded in Chekhov’s The Seagull like Zod in his crystal prison, hurtling through the void of some Goffmanian Phantom Zone. The novel itself concludes ambivalently, on a note either of ovation or irony, with a line like a theater critic’s review of a performance: “He had brought it off,” it reads, “the well-established stage star, once so widely heralded for his force as an actor, whom in his heyday people would flock to the theater to see.”

Dogma is the second in a projected trilogy by Lars Iyer. Like its predecessor, Spurious, this book is surreal, brainy, plotless, and arguably pointless. It is also brilliantly written and very funny. The only problem is that, in wondering who else might enjoy it, I couldn’t think of anyone I know to whom I could give an unqualified recommendation. True, that might suggest something about the kind of people I hang around with, but I can’t help noticing that it suggests something about these books too. They’re certainly not for everyone. In fact, I fear that relating to these characters might be a warning — the fading canary in the mental health coalmine.
Dogma, like Spurious, is told entirely through the interactions of Lars and W., a pair of philosophy lecturers and writers locked in a strange semblance of friendship. Though they live on opposite sides of England, they have frequent phone calls, visit each other, and even travel together. Sometimes W.’s girlfriend Sal is in tow, but it’s usually just the two of them, operating like a combination between Waiting for Godot and Withnail and I.
Early on, the men embark on a lecture tour of the southern United States, and it appears for a flickering moment that the book might contain a beginning, middle, and end. Maybe character arcs too. But that plotline goes cold pretty quickly. Iyer isn’t interested in starting in one place and ending up in another. Instead of developing, his characters circle the drain — a fitting arrangement for a pair who obsess about entropy while seemingly doing their best to embody the concept.
They share an incredible inventory of obsessions: the end of the world, the connection between religion and capitalism. They love the mysterious Texan musician Jandek and the slightly less weird Texan musician Josh T. Pearson. W. can’t stop talking about Franz Rosenzweig, and frequently wonders if God’s existence can be proven through higher mathematics read in the original German. They obsess over the relationship between Kafka and Max Brod, the friend who made Kafka posthumously famous, repeatedly asking of themselves and one another which of them might be Kafka to the other’s Brod. W. can’t stop talking about the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, and, in particular the film Werckmeister Harmonies.
This isn’t merely a list of preoccupations. They’re practically fetishes, ground to be covered again and again. Repetition is somehow key to Iyer’s project. When the men decide to start a new intellectual movement of somewhat unclear underpinnings and call it “Dogma,” W. devises the rules and then repeats them, revising and elaborating on them. The effect of so much repetition is that the sequence of the book — which is divided into many small sections of just a few pages each — is all but irrelevant. Dogma reads almost like a collage, a fitting style for a book more concerned with philosophy than narrative.
Ideas drive everything. Lars and W.’s biggest fear is that they are cursed with the ability to recognize and appreciate important intellectual contributions, but are unable to make significant contributions of their own. Or — somewhat more poignantly — they fear they’ve actually had their great ideas and forgotten them, or that their great ideas passed in conversation without either of them realizing it. The reader is put in the position of wondering the same thing as he reads. Have I missed the point in all this?
Iyer employs the first-person perspective with fantastic flair and originality. The narrator, Lars, reveals himself almost exclusively through the words of his friend and says practically nothing about himself directly. It would be challenging, if not impossible, to find a page in Dogma which does not contain the words “W. says.” This narrative choice is especially interesting given that W.’s primary mode of communication with Lars is scathing criticism, of his weight, his clothes, this apathy, his failure to do good work or to think deeply. In a late scene, W. wishes for Lars to join him at a meeting with his employers, with whom he has developed an adversarial relationship. “Why not take a lawyer, I ask him. He’s allowed to. No, he wants the equivalent of an idiot child, W. says. He wants the equivalent of a diseased ape with scabs round his mouth throwing faeces around the room….Did you see who he had with him?, they’ll say. What he had with him? My God, we shouldn’t make his life any worse: that’s what they’ll say, W. says. And perhaps then they’ll show mercy.” Relentless and very funny, the abuse never seems to bother Lars, who receives it in a state of either bemusement or agreement — it’s never clear which.
When, years ago, Roger Ebert reviewed W.’s favorite movie, Werckmeister Harmonies, he described it as “maddening if you are not in sympathy with it, mesmerizing if you are.” It’s a perfect characterization of Dogma’s protagonists. “We’ve become strange, W. says. We’ve spent too much time in each other’s company... We’re no longer fit for human society, W. says.” He’s almost right, I’m afraid. But not quite. I don’t know who else might like this strange book as much as I did, but, as for me, I can’t wait for the third.
Previously:Mold, Gin, and the Apocalypse: Lars Iyer’s Spurious

There are probably scads and scads of books like 13. I've seen them in libraries and used book stores. They are books that take on one topic and mine it for endless anecdotes and historical curios, but they don't claim that by looking through the prism of the topic at hand, a reader can discern the entire arc of human history. The books are about what they are about, and all you need to do as a reader is sit back and be entertained and informed. John McPhee, who is very good at this sort of thing, once wrote a book entirely about Oranges, for example. Nathaniel Lachenmeyer does this sort of thing well, too. His book is an impeccably researched look at an old superstition. With every turn of the page the reader is presented with another odd relic that Lachenmeyer has dug up for our perusal: the existence of popular superstition-defying "13 clubs" at the beginning of the 20th century, for example. And onward the book moves through Friday the 13th, the missing 13th floor, and all the rest. Taken as a whole, the book is a nifty piece of well-researched reportage bringing to light the many murky progenitors of this now commonplace superstition.

Published posthumously, Ryszard Kapuscinski'sTravels with Herodotus is very self consciously a final book. In it Kapuscinski reflects on his life as a writer, rarely delving much into the details of his travels with which his readers have become familiar, but instead dwelling more upon writing itself. But more so, his focus is on Herodotus, the historian from ancient Greece, who Kapuscinski counts as a great historian and whose books were a near constant companion of Kapuscinski's on his travels.Indeed Travels more than anything else reads like a companion text to Herodotus' book The Histories - a footnote early on refers readers to the Oxford University Press edition for those who want to follow along at home.And that may be a good idea because, for the most part, Travels is Herodotus seen through Kapuscinski's lens. He tells us that the book was given to him by an editor before his first journey abroad and he took it with him on nearly all of his assignments during his long career. In looking at Herodotus, Kapuscinski suggests to the reader the origins of journalism as well as its purpose while also marveling at the fantastical stories and bizarre cultures described by the Greek. Kapuscinski is a true fan.But this book is also a memoir of sorts, and Kapuscinski parcels out little nuggets of the Kapuscinski philosophy, a way of looking at the world that will be familiar to his readers.Describing his very first trip, to India, Kapuscinski describes devouring books about the country and about the power of the written word to transport and teach:With each new title I read, I felt as if I were taking a new journey to India, recalling places I had visited and discovering new depths and aspects, fresh meanings, of things which earlier I had assumed I knew. These journeys were much more multidimensional than my original one. I discovered also that these expeditions could be further prolonged, repeated, augmented by reading more books, studying maps, looking at paintings and photographs. What is more, they had a certain advantage over the actual trip - in an iconographic journey such as this one, one could stop at any point, calmly observe, rewind to the previous image, etc., something for which on a real journey there is neither the time nor the chance.And of course, I'm sure there are many readers, like myself, for whom Kapuscinski's books have had "a certain advantage over the actual trip." With Kapuscinski as a guide, his books offer more of an escape and more excitement than most of us can hope for from our planned excursions to non-threatening locales.In Herodotus, Kapuscinski undoubtedly sees his foundation, without whom Kapuscinski and many other journalists, historians, and travel writers wouldn't be possible. As Kapuscinski shows us, the world of the Greek nearly 2,500 years ago isn't all that far removed from what Kapuscinski has spent his career doing. At the same time, we wouldn't consider Herodotus a journalist in the modern sense, one who is beholden to proper sourcing, fact checking, and objectivity. Herodotus gathered up tales of mysterious faraway lands, relating even the ones that sound far-fetched, crafted narratives to suit his efforts, and passed judgment when it struck him to do so. Following his death, Kapuscinski was accused of just such things by Jack Shafer at Slate. Defending Kapuscinski, I wrote "To define [Kapuscinski's] books as journalism (or memoir, or "truth") exclusively does a disservice to journalism - offering a context within which this work fits, or even a disclaimer, is more appropriate - but to suggest that there isn't a place for writing and books like these does a disservice to readers." In speculating about Herodotus' way of life, Kapuscinski defends the writer's right to embellish in the service of both making a living and entertaining readers (two goals that often go hand in hand)It is possible... that the rhythm of Herodotus's life and work was as follows: he made a long journey, and upon his return traveled to various Greek cities and organized something akin to literary evenings, in the course of which he recounted the experiences, impressions, and observations he had gathered during his peregrinations. It is entirely likely that he made his living from such gatherings, and that he also financed his subsequent trips in this way, and so it was important to him to have the largest auditorium possible, to draw a crowd. It would be to his advantage, therefore, to begin with something that would rivet attention, arouse curiosity - something a tad sensational. Story plots meant to move, amaze, astonish, pop up throughout his entire opus; without such stimuli, his audience would have dispersed early, bored, leaving him with an empty purse.Perhaps it was a similar motivation that pushed Kapuscinski to not just send back terse wire service missives on the conflicts and battles he observed but also to keep a separate notebook of observations that he would craft into his books. But to suggest that Kapsucinski's motives were craven and profit-driven alone would be to ignore the profound empathy with which he treats his subjects and the care with which he observes the foreign lands he visits.In Travels, Kapuscinski describes being lured to Algiers in 1965 by a vague tip from a source. Upon his arrival he discovers that indeed a coup has occurred, but he is dismayed to find that it has been bloodless and so there are no scenes of battle and mayhem to describe to hungry readers back home. Then Kapuscinski realizes how misguided this attitude is:It was here in Algiers, several years after I had begun working as a reporter, that it slowly began to dawn on me that I had set myself on an erroneous path back then. Until that awakening, I had been searching for spectacular imagery, laboring under the illusion that it was compelling, observable tableaux that somehow justified my presence, absolving me of responsibility to understand the events at hand. It was the fallacy that one can interpret the world only by means of what it chooses to show us in the hours of its convulsions, when it is rocked by shots and explosions, engulfed in flames and smoke, choked in dust and the stench of burning, when everything collapses into rubble on which people sit despairing over the remains of their loved ones.If there is a philosophy that encapsulates Kapuscinski, that is it. Body counts and "colorful" descriptions of chaos and violence offer us no insight into our world. Only with time and effort come empathy and understanding. This holds true of all of our best journalism (cf.George Packer).But Kapuscinski does not romanticize this noble cause. He instead sees it as a symptom of his loneliness. He is not the swashbuckling hero journalist that some portray him as but a wandering lost soul imprisoned by his travels. Near the end of this odd little memoir, travelogue, and homage to Herodotus, Kapuscinski, as if knowing that this is his goodbye, lays himself bare to his readers:Such people, while useful, even agreeable, to others, are, if truth be told, frequently unhappy - lonely in fact. Yes, they seek out others, and it may even seem to them that in a certain country or city they have managed to find true kinship and fellowship, having come to know and learn about a people; but they wake up one day and suddenly feel that nothing actually binds them to these people, that they can leave here at once. They realize that another country, some other people, have now beguiled them, and that yesterday's most riveting event now pales and loses all meaning and significance.For all intents and purposes, they do not grow attached to anything, do not put down deep roots. Their empathy is sincere, but superficial.Kapuscinski's admission is stark and sad, but one must think that it was his lack of joy, of hubris, of a sense of heroism that underpinned the singular tone of his work and made it such a revelation to read.See Also:The Reporter: Ryszard Kapuscinski

Detective fiction and theory have a surprising history, one that I sometimes use to rationalize my childhood love of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. And I’m not alone: T.S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, and G.K. Chesterton were obsessed with popular mysteries. We like whodunits, Bertolt Brecht thought, because our lives are filled with structural problems and social contradictions that aren’t caused by single agents. Crime-solving sleuths, people like Sherlock Holmes and Nancy Drew, help us put back into place a system that no longer functions: it’s only in detective fiction that we start with a bunch of evidence, follow it rationally to a conclusion, and, in the end, apprehend a villain. Reading detectives, the thinking goes, helps us do what we can’t normally: piece together fragments, forming something coherent out of the madness.
Or at least, traditionally. Enter, then, Laurent Binet’s newest novel, The 7th Function of Language, a madcap sharply irreverent French theory mash-up that’s part mystery and part satire, by the Prix Goncourt winning author of HHhH. The new book turns Roland Barthes’s accidental death in 1980 into a murder investigation set against French intellectual life. With a cast of characters that includes Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva with guest appearances by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Umberto Eco, and John Searle, it’s no surprise Binet’s book is way more dizzying than most detective stories. What is shocking, though, is how it manages to respect the theories and mock the theorists all at once.
The question that prompts the book is simple: who killed Roland Barthes and why? On the case is Bayard, a grumpy inspector who’s more than a bit impatient with the posturing of French intellectuals (who can blame him?). Simon Herzog, his sidekick, shares more than initials with Sherlock Holmes; he’s a young semiology instructor brought on to help decode and interpret the case’s signs. Together, they navigate a blindingly bizarre and often raucous set of worlds: picture a chase scene through a gay sauna with Foucault, Bulgarian secret agents with possible ties to Kristeva, drug-riddled parties after the infamous Derrida-Searle debate, and even a Logos Club competition, which is the kind of intellectual fight club that Plato wishes he would have invented.
What the troublesome twosome learn along the way is that Barthes, just before he died, was working on the so-called (fictional) seventh function of language: the ability—first introduced by linguist Roman Jakobson—of language to persuade, convince, and seduce. In the novel, French intellectuals and politicians like socialist president François Mitterrand and his one-time opponent Valéry Giscard d'Estaing are all after the function for themselves.
But all of this —deciphering the mysteries of the seventh function and figuring out who killed Barthes—isn’t why you keep reading. Sure, mystery propels the book forward, though we’re certainly not going to get the clean resolutions Brecht thinks we want: The Seventh Function revels in a world where randomness and madness reign.
What really drives the book is Binet’s irreverence—Philippe Sollers is a loudmouth dandy, Foucault masturbates to a Mick Jagger poster, Umberto Eco gets urinated on by a stranger in a Bologna bar. All of this might lead you to think of Binet as a writer of long-form libel. But Binet’s cheek is grounded in a serious familiarity with and respect for the theories, if not the personalities, he uses to populate his book (a lot of the anecdotes are non-fictional, and he provides in-depth treatment of the philosophies at hand.) I bookmarked a page with titles of talks from a Cornell conference; Searle’s giving one called “Fake or feint: performing the F words in fictional works,” while Spivak lectures on “Should the subaltern sometimes shut up?”
For all its lightness and raucous humor, The7th Function can sometimes feel a little heavy handed, especially when it comes to the blurring of fiction and nonfiction.“ Life is not a novel,” the book begins, and a few hundred pages later after I’d started to ignore the self-aware interruptions of the narrator, the semiologist-sidekick Simon Herzog himself starts suspecting he’s in a novel, one by “an author unafraid of tackling cliches.” Maybe Herzog’s paranoia and distrust are the result of reading too much philosophy. I couldn’t help but feel, though, that the narrator was wearing brass knuckles spelling out “postmodern” and trying, repeatedly, to punch me in the face.
In spite of this, what’s most shocking is that Binet’s novel works, although perhaps more to draw attention to our mad, mad world than to help reconcile us to it as Brecht hoped—for that, we might need more than the fictional seventh function of language.

Tillman’s authorial voice is singular, and her spoken voice is, too. It’s truly an amplification of the voice on the page. Many people have remarked on the quality of Tillman’s voice: its strength and intellect, its wit and warmth. It’s also raspy, sensitive, perceptive, keen—delivered with a New York accent.

I.What is style... and how does one achieve it? Our English teachers admonish us to enliven our verb choices, to reach for colorful synonyms... and we imbibe the idea that style means not sounding like anyone else, that styles are as distinctive as handwriting. As, indeed, some are. When we encounter "aurochs and angels and the durable pigments of art," we know we're in the presence of Nabokov; "There was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun" announces Hemingway like a calling card.But how many legions of writers, in search of style, have settled for Lolita-lite, or cadences half-in-Ernest? Or conversely, aiming for originality, have ended up mired in pretension? It's too easy, pursuing individuation en masse, to sacrifice one's native freedoms to someone else's idea of what style should be.So what, really, can we say about style? That some writers have more of it than others. (These we call "stylists.") That it's possible to be a fine writer and to sport a neutral style. (I'm not sure I could say of a sentence, "Only Ian McEwan could have written this.") And that a very few writers, in the course of a lifetime, manage to elevate more than one style to a state of perfection. Such is the case of Leonard Michaels, whose late novel, Sylvia, achieves a pellucidity as uniquely his as the ferocious defamiliarization of his early short stories. So, what is style? For the time being let's leave it at this: it's the thing Leonard Michaels has in spades.II.On the stage of late-Twentieth-Century American fiction, Leonard Michaels cuts, to my mind, a somewhat tragic figure. The tragedy being that I wouldn't hear of him until the summer of 2007, when I read Wyatt Mason's essay "The Irresponsibility of Feelings" in Harper's. My subsequent reading would confirm Mason's intuition that Michaels is one of the major literary artists of our time. But before FSG's recent resuscitation of the Michaels catalogue, most of his fiction had fallen out of print.The reasons for this are manifold, but we can point to a couple of obvious ones. The first is that Michaels, like his beloved Byron, seems to have been born under a bad sign. Raised on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Michaels came of age in that no-man's-land between the Beat Generation and the Summer of Love. In New York's bohemian precincts, the alienation of the former persisted, but without the political agitation that focused it. Drugs were rampant, but had not yet become a Utopian "culture." Psychotherapy was taken seriously enough to drain most of the fun from sexual liberation, but not seriously enough to save troubled young people like Michaels' first wife, Sylvia Bloch, who would, in 1963, commit suicideMichaels evokes this milieu beautifully in his second book of stories, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (now reissued as part of The Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels). His fictional stand-in, Phillip Leibowitz, is, like Michaels, a working-class kid, a basketball player, a son of immigrants. Watching Leibowitz struggle with dingy walkup apartments, harrowing relationships, unsavory sexual encounters, druggy intellectuals, and poverty, we sense Michaels' own alienation. For Michaels was, however ambiguously, an autobiographical writer.Which brings us to the second reason for his lack of renown: Michaels' writerly practices were completely at odds with the emerging structures of the publishing world. Where editors prize prolific authors, Michaels was an obsessive rewriter of his own work. (Sylvia: a novel was first "Sylvia" the story-length memoir.) Where publicists seek ways to pitch books to readers, Michaels transgressed serially against every manner of classification. How to market a book like 1990's Shuffle, which combines new short-stories with previously published fiction, essays, and fictionalized (or not) journal entries? This isn't to knock the publishing industry; in my own urge for linearity, I don't know which version of The Men's Club to read. It is, however, to salute Michaels for his fortitude. He was an artist, and he persisted in his quiddities. And every ten years or so, they would produce a substantial, integral work of literature. Going Places.I Would Have Saved Them... The Nachman Stories. And Sylvia.III.To read a Michaels story from the 1970s is to feel oneself in the presence of a visionary, a furious expressionist. Here, from "The Captain," is a bit of description of a sadomasochistic (and possibly imaginary) sexual encounter:"On a shelf about chest high lay three hundred sausages, coiled in convoluted complications, a monster brain. A long gray iron chain. The prospect of such appetite suffused me with feelings of poverty, no education, and moral shock, but in one clean movement of self-disgust I laid on hands like he who knows. The chain chuckled as my fingers pierced its holes."Michaels' first language was Yiddish, and here we see him toying with the varied registers of English as though discovering them for the first time: the Biblical, the clinical, the philosophical, and the visceral. All of Michaels' stories do this, in one way or another. Typically, his sentences are savagely compressed, forcing the reader to reconstitute their full meaning. Language is gloriously obtrusive.By the 1990s, however, Michaels' prose had become a clear-running stream. Here is how he begins Sylvia:"In 1960, after two years of graduate school at Berkeley, I returned to New York without a Ph.D. or any idea what I'd do, only a desire to write stories. I'd also been at the University of Michigan, from 1953 to 1956. All in all, five years of classes in literature. I don't know how else I might have spent those five years, but I didn't want to hear more lectures, study for more exams, or see myself growing old in the library."Shorn of its figurative tangles, relaxed, decompressed, this is a style that insists, "this is this, and that is that, and this is the way things stand." It is a style that doesn't shy from statements of truth. Which makes it the perfect vehicle for a reassessment of Michaels' first marriage and Sylvia Bloch's death.IV.Sylvia is a slippery title in two ways. First, it tempts us to conflate Michaels' first wife with her fictional namesake. The Sylvia we meet in the book is a woman dancing on the edge of the abyss: volatile, secretive, obsessive. But she is also a less than round character, and in shaping his narrative, Michaels largely elides Sylvia's past and the parts of her present not contiguous with her husband's life. From a certain feminist perspective, this might be a source of critique, but really, all it means is that this is a novel. It retains the intimacy of its origins as a memoir, but can behave more freely with its characters.Which brings us to the second tricky thing about the title: really, Sylvia isn't about Sylvia at all. It is about the man who marries her, and the wonder of Michaels' account is its lacerating honesty. The narrator doesn't suffer through Sylvia's psychic disintegration as the cost of loving her; in some way her instability is the catalyst for his love. When he meets her, he finds himself "hypnotized by Sylvia's exotic flashing effect." The unsettlingly speedy commencement of their sexual relationship only deepens the attraction.Sealed inside an increasingly hermetic folie a deux, the narrator cannot bring himself to see Sylvia's violent outbursts and compulsions and depressions as symptoms, and in this way contributes to her disintegration. Then, awakening to Sylvia's illness, he finds himself pulling away from her, abandoning her to her fate. Years later, what unifies his two perspectives - the one from inside and the one from outside - is a steady sense of guilt."My body lusted. That was my secret infidelity, never confessed to my journals. Despite the daily misery of marriage, I wrote that I loved Sylvia. I wrote it repeatedly into my journals, and I wiped sincerely pathetic tears from my eyes. 'I love Sylvia.'"These journal entries are interspersed throughout the narrative, and only deepen the sense of ferocious candor. And what we see beneath the surface is pathetic, in the Greek sense: two suffering souls who can live neither with nor without each other. The narrator resists any attempt to exculpate himself for Sylvia's death or, conversely, to overstate his fault. What he does do is document (and offer an antidote to) the solipsism of youth. And we are forced to wonder: Given better friends, better family, better conversation, and a better marriage, might Sylvia have survived?"In the conversational style of the day," Michaels writes, "everything was always about something; or, to put it differently, everything was always really about something other than what it seemed to be about... The plays and sonnets of Shakespeare and the songs of Dylan were all equally about something. The murder of President Kennedy was, too. Nothing was fully resident in itself. Nothing was plain."In making plain the suffering of two people, Sylvia reveals that style in the truest sense is not merely a set of aesthetic choices; it is the outward display of an author's ethics. In writing this book, Leonard Michaels honored Sylvia's death by trying to see his own connection to it clearly. He tried to let their life together be fully, fictionally, resident in itself. And beneath the layers of resentment, short-sightedness, and reproach, Sylvia became a final act of love, a testament of "desperate happiness."He would have saved her if he could.